ARK offloads $5.2M in Coinbase stock amid 18-month high

ARK Invest, one of the companies that filed an application for a spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF), is again taking profits on its Coinbase (COIN) shares as the stock price surges.

On Nov. 27, ARK sold 43,956 Coinbase shares from its ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF), according to a trade notification seen by Cointelegraph. Coinbase stock reached $119.7 per share at the time of the sale, giving the transaction a value of $5.3 million, data from TradingView shows.

Coinbase crypto exchange has seen its shares jump to an 18-month high after rival exchange Binance and its former CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to money laundering and sanctions violations in the United States on Nov. 21, 2023.

According to data from TradingView, Coinbase stock is up 168% over the past year, surging more than 220% since January 2023. The stock is still down about 70% from its all-time high of $319 posted in September 2021, or a few months after its trading launch in April 2021.

ARK has been repeatedly selling Coinbase stocks throughout 2023. Cathie Wood’s investment firm previously offloaded 63,675 COIN shares in October from its ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW), totaling $5.1 million.

ARK was also actively selling Coinbase shares in July 2023, when the stock was trading around $90. According to ARK’s trading data, the firm off-loaded more than $103 million in Coinbase shares in July.

ARK has also been actively selling off Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) stock. On Nov. 24, the ARKW dumped 94,624 GBTC shares for roughly $3 million after selling nearly 700,000 GBTC shares in one month.

According to Bloomberg’s ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, ARK’s sales of GTBC are not an indication that the firm is not bullish on Bitcoin, or making room for its upcoming spot Bitcoin ETF, the ARK Invest and 21Shares (ARKB). “Neither is true,” Balchunas wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Nov. 27, referring to his previous observations that ARK was likely selling winners and vice-versa to maintain desired weightings.

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“Since GBTC is up 76% since August ARK has to sell many shares to keep a 9%-ish weighting. And even with that selling, its weighting has gone up,” the ETF analyst noted.

While selling Coinbase and GBTC, ARK has concurrently been bagging some crypto-related stocks. On Nov. 27, ARKF acquired 252,421 shares of the crypto-friendly banking app SoFi. Year to date, ARK bought a total of 1.6 million SOFI shares, worth $11 million at today’s prices, according to TradingView. ARK has also been accumulating shares of the crypto-friendly investment app Robinhood, buying $1.1 million worth of the stock on Nov. 8.

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